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2022-06-08 Home Front: WoT
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Kansas woman arrested for allegedly leading all-female ISIS battalion UPDATE: She pled guilty
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A woman who once lived in Kansas has been arrested after federal prosecutors charged her with joining the Islamic State group and leading an all-female battalion of AK-47 wielding militants.
The U.S. Attorney in Alexandria, Virginia, announced Saturday that Allison Fluke-Ekren,
| ...mother of five, wife of three jihadis — sequentially, they kept getting killed, first the sniper, then the Bangladeshi drone expert, then the failed defender of Raqqa—teacher, home schooler, fluent in Arabic, Turkish, and Spanish. Two of the kids escaped her clutches, getting themselves to safety with her first husband in America... |
42, has been charged with providing material support to a terrorist organization.
The criminal complaint was filed under seal back in 2019 but made public Saturday after Fluke-Ekren was brought back to the U.S. Friday to face charges. Her alleged participation in the Islamic State had not been publicly known before Saturday's announcement.
Prosecutors say Fluke-Ekren wanted to recruit operatives to attack a college campus in the U.S. and discussed a terrorist attack on a shopping mall. She told one witness that "she considered any attack that did not kill a large number of individuals to be a waste of resources," according to an FBI affidavit.
Prosecutors say she was a 'fervent believer' of ISIS ideology
That affidavit from FBI Special Agent David Robins also alleges that Fluke-Ekren became leader of an Islamic State unit called "Khatiba Nusaybah" in the Syrian city of Raqqa in late 2016. The all-female unit was trained in the use of AK-47 rifles, grenades and suicide belts.
In all, the affidavit cites observations from six different witnesses, including some who have been charged with terrorism offenses and some who were held at prison camps for former Islamic state members.
A detention memo filed Friday by First Assistant U.S. Attorney Raj Parekh states that Fluke-Ekren even trained children how to use assault rifles, and that at least one witness saw one of Fluke-Ekren's children, approximately 5 or 6 years old, holding a machine gun in the family's home in Syria.
"Fluke-Ekren has been a fervent believer in the radical terrorist ideology of ISIS for many years, having traveled to Syria to commit or support violent jihad. Fluke-Ekren translated her extremist beliefs into action by serving as the appointed leader and organizer of an ISIS military battalion, directly training women and children in the use of AK-47 assault rifles, grenades, and suicide belts to support the Islamic State's murderous aims," Parekh wrote.
FROM KANSAS TO SYRIA
According to court papers, Fluke-Ekren moved to Egypt in 2008 and traveled frequently between Egypt and the U.S. over the next three years. She has not been in the U.S. since 2011.
Prosecutors believe she moved to Syria around 2012. In early 2016, her husband was killed in the Syrian city of Tell Abyad while trying to carry out a terrorist attack, prosecutors said. Later that year, prosecutors say she married a Bangladeshi ISIS member who specialized in drones, but he died in late 2016 or early 2017.
Four months after that man's death, she again remarried a prominent Islamic state leader who was responsible for the Islamic State group's defense of Raqqa.
She told one witness in 2018 that she instructed a person in Syria to tell Fluke-Ekren's Family she was dead so the U.S. government would not try to find her, according to Parekh's memo.
Photos from a family blog called 4KansasKids show her and her children in the years they traveled between Kansas and Egypt, posing at the base of the pyramids in Egypt and playing in the snow in the U.S.
A 2004 article about homeschooling in the Lawrence Journal-World featured Fluke-Ekren and her children. She told the paper she pulled her kids from public school because she was dissatisfied with how her children were performing in public and private schools. Homeschooling allowed her to teach Arabic to her kids.
Court papers do not indicate how she was captured, or how long she was in custody before being turned over to the FBI Friday.
She is scheduled to make an initial appearance at U.S. District Court in Alexandria on Monday, at which time she would likely be appointed an attorney.
A former US schoolteacher who became a high-ranking Islamic State
...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that they were al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're really very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allah around with every other sentence, but to hear western pols talk they're not really Moslems....
official and organized an all-female IS military battalion, pleaded guilty Tuesday to supporting a foreign terrorist group, the Justice Department said.
Kansas-born Allison Fluke-Ekren, 42, admitted to engaging in "terrorism-related activities" in Syria, Libya, and Iraq between 2011 and 2019.
"Fluke-Ekren ultimately served as the leader and organizer of an ISIS military battalion, known as the Khatiba Nusaybah, where she trained women on the use of automatic firing AK-47 assault rifles, grenades, and suicide belts," the department said.
Her husband was a member of the murderous Moslem Ansar al-Sharia
...a Salafist militia which claims it is not part of al-Qaeda, even though it works about the same and for the same ends. There are groups of the same name in Libya and Yemen, with the Libyan versions currently most active. Tunisia's Shabaab al-Tawhid started out an Ansar al-Sharia and changed its name in early 2014. It still uses the old name now and then, probably because the stationery's not all used up and the web site hasn't expired yet...
group which attacked the US mission in Benghazi, Libya in 2012, and then became a leader of an Islamic State sniper group in Syria.
The department said the two were involved in murderous Moslem activities across the Middle East after they left the United States in 2011.
Fluke-Ekren was apprehended in Syria sometime after the early-2019 territorial defeat of Islamic State, and flown to the United States on January 28.
The court record indicates that her attorneys and the Justice Department spent months negotiating her guilty plea on a single count, supporting a foreign terrorist organization, a charge which brings up to 20 years in prison.
She is scheduled to be sentenced on October 25.
- BORN ON KANSAS FARM -
Fluke-Ekren married a man named Fluke and had two children. They split and she married Volkan Ekren, a Moslem with whom she had at least three more children.
As Fluke-Ekren, she studied at the University of Kansas and then earned a master's degree in teaching from a college in Indiana.
- JOINING LIONS OF ISLAM -
But the Justice department suggested her husband was already involved with radical Islamists at that time.
They moved to Libya in 2011, the year of the Arab Spring uprisings and the beginning of the Libyan civil war.
They were in Benghazi in September 2012 when Ansar al-Sharia attacked the US mission and CIA office there, killing the US ambassador and three others.
Her husband took documents and an electronic device from the fire-charred compound and Fluke-Ekren helped him analyze the contents for the group, the Justice Department said.
They then moved to The Sick Man of Europe Turkey
 ...the occupiers of Greek Asia Minor...
and Syria, where they became deeply involved with Islamic State, even living in the group's djinn-infested Mosul
... the home of a particularly ferocious and hairy djinn...
, Iraq stronghold for a time.
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Posted by badanov 2022-06-08 00:00||
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Posted by bman 2022-06-08 11:11||
2022-06-08 11:11||
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Posted by Frank G 2022-06-08 11:51||
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Posted by HeavyG 2022-06-08 14:29||
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Posted by HeavyG 2022-06-08 14:31||
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Posted by M. Murcek 2022-06-08 18:27||
2022-06-08 18:27||
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